Clay Stafford talks with Abbott Kahler “Advice for Writing True Crime”

Abbott Kahler interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I love nonfiction and fiction, and I had an opportunity to read Abbott Kahler’s new upcoming book, Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia, at the Dawn of World War II. Great title, of course; pulls everyone in. The amount of research Abbott put into this nonfiction book intrigued me, so I had to speak with her from her home in New York about how she put it all together. “So, Abbott, you've got all this research coming in. How do you make it useful and organize it rather than just putting it in a big Word document full of notes? I love research, probably too much, and my notes become a glorious mess that I must always go back and untangle. What's your organizational process? Anything you can share with me to make my process go smoother and more time-efficient?”

“I'm a big believer in outlining. I think it's essential. I use a tool called Scrivener that helps outline.”

“I’ve got it. I use it. But I’m not sure I use it well.”

“It allows you to move sections around, and it's searchable to find sources there. If there's a quote you want to remember, you can make sure it's in there, and you can find it just by searching. I think the outline for this book was 130,000 words…”

“The outline was 130,000 words?”

“Much longer than the finished book. The finished book is about 85,000 words, so I over-outline. I think it helps get a sense of narrative. I do a chronological outline, and I can see where I might want to move information and where I might want to describe someone differently. I think outlining extensively lets you see the story, making it much less daunting. Here you are with all this information, but if you have it formatted and organized, it will be much easier to tackle it piece by piece. You know, bird by bird, as Anne Lamott says. I highly recommend outlining for anybody who will tackle a big nonfiction project.”

“Well, even in fiction, there can also be a great amount of research depending upon the topic, setting, or even the personalities or careers of characters. Compare and contrast the writing of a nonfiction book versus that of a novel because you’ve done both.”

“Writing fiction was a surprise to me. I thought it was going to be easy. I thought, ‘Look at all this freedom I have. I can make my characters say and do whatever they want. If I want somebody to murder someone, goddammit, I am going to let them murder someone.’ You can't do that in nonfiction. That freedom was a lot of fun, and it was exhilarating, but it was also terrifying. I was always second-guessing my plot points. Does this twist work? Should there be another twist here? Is it too obvious? Do I have too many red herrings? Do I not have enough red herrings? And in nonfiction, you don't have those issues. What issue you have in nonfiction is that I am dumping information.”

“Of course, writers do that maybe too much sometimes in fiction, too.”

“One of the things I talk about with fellow nonfiction writers is how you can integrate backstory and history. You always have to give context. How do you integrate that context and still keep the momentum going forward, still keep the narrative moving, and still keep people invested in your story when you have to explain who Darwin was and what he did, you have to explain who William Beebe was and what he did, you have to explain what the Galapagos are, and what the history of the Galapagos is before you get into what happened there with these crazy characters. It’s different approaches and different skill sets.”

“I can see parallels, though, in both fiction and nonfiction here. Which do you like best?”

“It’s fun to go back and forth, and I think writing fiction teaches me a lot about nonfiction. You know, what you can get away with in nonfiction while still sticking to nonfiction. It allows you to be a little bit more inventive with your process in a way that's a lot of fun.”

“Interesting. Returning to Scrivener, do you start in Scrivener right from the beginning and start putting your notes in there?”

“I'll open Scrivener, and I'll start organizing by source. Say, I have Friedrich Ritter, a character in the book, and here's everything I know about Friedrich Ritter. I'll have a Friedrich Ritter file. Then I'll have a Baroness file and a Dore Strauch file, just getting into the characters in these separate ways. Their files are always accessible, and I can refer to them easily when I want to. ‘Oh, wait a minute. What did Dore say at that time? Oh, here it's in my Scrivener file on Dore.’ I draft in Word. I'm just an old-school person who uses Word to draft. I don't like Google Docs. I don't like drafting in Scrivener. I like Word because it lets you see the page count and feel like you're gaining momentum because the file is growing. It's a satisfaction that I think I—and probably many other people—need to see as they go through a big project like that.”

“I started with a typewriter, so for me, it seems to make sense.”

“I get you. I started with the word processor, which I don't even know if they make anymore. But you know, word processors were the rage back in college.”

“The narrative of a nonfiction book, then, is pretty much the same as that of a fiction book, in that you've got a traditional beginning, middle, and an end with all the conflicts, arcs, etc., that you find in fiction manuscript, correct?”

“For nonfiction writers, one of the greatest compliments we receive is that ‘it reads like fiction.’ That's something a lot of nonfiction writers strive for. They want to write something so immersive that you forget you're reading facts. It probably goes back to the fact that history is boring if you had a bad history teacher. A lot of people grow up thinking history is boring. It's irrelevant and boring. I'm here to try to tell you that history is fascinating. History is full of blood and guts and death and murder and striving and ambition and pathos and all kinds of interesting interactions between people. You must tell the story so people can relate to it. That's the challenge with nonfiction and what many of us go for.”

“My wife asked, ‘How is this book?’ And I'm like, ‘Well, if I wrote it in a story, no one would believe it.’ But these are real people.”

“It’s so funny you say that. I call it stranger than fiction. And I once proposed to one of my old editors who turned down this book, ‘Well, why don't I write this book as fiction if the publishers are not going to let me do it as nonfiction?’ And they're like, ‘Nobody would believe it.’”

“With nonfiction, you can't put words in their mouth. You can't change the characters’ life trajectory. How many creative liberties can you take in a book of true nonfiction? Are there liberties?”

“I wouldn't say liberties. I would say techniques. You can use foreshadowing, and I was fortunate in the sense that Dore Strauch, one of my main characters, not only wrote an incredible memoir in which she was very free about her feelings and her thoughts—so I was able to include feelings and thoughts authentically because they were documented in her memoir—but she always had a sense of foreboding. You know, she said things like, ‘I had a great ominous feeling that murder was just around the corner.’ She said these things constantly because that island was creepy and bad things were happening, and I don't blame her. There was a sense of foreboding.”

“Pirate ghosts everywhere.”

“She was the pirate ghost, and so it was great because sometimes it can feel heavy-handed if a nonfiction author tries to make too much sense of foreboding and foreshadowing, and all this ominous, you know, ‘Wait till you see what comes next.’ It could feel a little forced and strained, but I had a character doing it for me here. And it was so much that my editor said, ‘I think you can cut about fifty percent of the foreshadowing,’ which I didn't even take insult to because it wasn't me doing it. It was the character doing it.”

“The real person.”

“Yes. So, you can do foreshadowing. You can do cliffhangers. You cut off a chapter when a lot of suspense is going on, and then you cut it off when you might find out what happens, and you go to another point of view and pick up that point of suspense in a later chapter. You can use techniques, but you really can't make up anything. You can't make up even gestures. You can't make up the way somebody looks. You can't make up feelings. All those things must come from sources.”

“Very interesting. From the acknowledgments at the back of the book, there seem to be several people who've helped edit, verify, and vet. You're the person with all the information there in Scrivener. How involved can they be in transforming and vetting what you write?”

“They don't have any say one way or the other, but in the interests of accuracy, I wanted to reach out to people who knew this story or the character, who knew Galapagos in particular, especially in the chapter about Galapagos history. I contacted Galapagos specialists, people who live there, work there, and conservation efforts. People have been there helping me with this book the whole time. Old sources aren't always accurate. There are probably ten different accounts of how many islands are in the Galapagos Archipelago. For things like that, you must double-check. Also, a lot of those people were translators. I got French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and a lot of Spanish documents. My rusty Spanish wasn't good enough to do it independently, so I had many translators helping me out. A lot of those people are from that. Whenever I could have gotten something wrong, I had to check with somebody else.”

“I saw one thing you did; you'd say they wrote this in one person's diary. In another person's diary, they wrote that. And they were conflicting in their points of view.”

“That was a challenge because I didn't want to give credence to one diary. I had suspicions about who was lying and when, but I also think that what people choose to lie about and omit is just as important sometimes as the truth, and I thought it was interesting. When you're dealing with a murder mystery, people will be lying.”

“Even a nonfiction murder mystery.”

“It's part of the genre. It's part of the game. And I wanted people to have their debate about it. Who do they think is lying? I had to include all those conflicting accounts to do that.”

“Do you have thoughts, recommendations, or advice for those thinking about writing their first nonfiction book?”

“Find something you're passionate about and willing to sit with for years. Look for primary source materials. Do they exist in a way that will allow you to tell the book the way you want to tell it? You need details if you want to write nonfiction that reads like fiction. I think that's the most important thing. And then I would say, sit your butt in the chair. The most important thing about writing anything is sitting your butt in a chair, making your fingers move, and getting the words down on the page. Everybody writes bad first drafts. Everybody writes bad third, fourth, fifth drafts. You keep honing and rewriting. Rewriting is probably the most important thing you can do. And make sure you have people around you who believe in what you're doing. Find a writing group where you think the people there are better than you. Always surround yourself with people you can aspire to.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park. She is also the host of Remus: The Mad Bootleg King, a podcast about legendary Jazz Age bootlegger George Remus. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in New York City and Greenport, New York. https://www.abbottkahler.com/eden-undone